Semifiction and the Epistemology of Celebrity in Rolling Thunder Revue: a Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
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“Seeing the Real You at Last”1: Semifiction and the Epistemology of Celebrity in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese Nathaniel T.C. Sutherland Charlottesville, VA Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, Penn State University, 2017 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of Virginia May 2021 Sutherland 1 Why do audiences trust some celebrities while regarding others as manufactured, undeserving of more than the slightest suspension of disbelief? Given that the broad public perception of celebrity in the early twenty-first century has, in the words of theorist Sharon Marcus, “become synonymous with an empty renown that has no basis in merit or achievement,” wherein “fans lack judgment, all celebrities are pseudo-celebrities, and the press can only participate in hoaxes or debunk them,” the claim that audiences ever trust any celebrity may seem laughably naïve.2 However seriously audiences may take celebrities, aren’t those audiences generally more inclined to approach celebrity with cynicism rather than faith? Taking Bob Dylan, once among the most famous people on the planet and a major influence on the American counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, as a case study, this thesis investigates the epistemology of celebrity, its effects on audiences and its relevance to contemporary American society. Seeking to differentiate fact from fiction, we will interrogate Dylan’s mercurial relationship with his various audiences, their continued trust in a figure known for tongue-in-cheek dishonesty, and the cinematic trickery Martin Scorsese employs to bind his film’s audiences to Dylan’s deceptions. How do publics reconcile a celebrity’s commercial success with their supposed authenticity? Why do we as audiences revere some stars while mocking others? What empowers certain celebrities to become cultural icons while others languish in relative obscurity, their ‘fifteen minutes’ gone in a flash? Why do audiences care so deeply about some celebrities that those celebrities become essential to those audiences’ very beings? Such questions are at the heart of Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, an alleged documentary about Bob Dylan’s legendary bicentennial tour through the antique theaters and nigh-forgotten civic centers of New England and the old South. In our attempt to address these thorny questions, we will begin by examining authenticity as such and its relationship to America’s Sutherland 2 popular music industry. From here, we will explore the ways in which Bob Dylan has straddled the paradox between authenticity and commercialism, taking special note of the moves Dylan makes to manufacture an authentic image. Next, we will take a deep dive into the filmic seas of Martin Scorsese’s latest documentary about Dylan’s career, untangling fact from fiction as we uncover the many masked faces and semifictions which together constitute Scorsese’s movie. Finally, we will consider the implications and potentially deleterious effects of contemporary celebrity culture on democratic politics. Certainly, not all celebrities demand our attention to the same degree, begging the question: Just what quality separates those celebrities, like Bob Dylan, whom audiences understand as sincere – and so, trust – from those celebrities the public sees as mere distractions? Indeed, despite garnering over twenty million unique views on YouTube since its September 2020 release, Paris Hilton’s official documentary This Is Paris failed to change public opinion about the heiress as vapid; likewise, when Paper magazine decided in November 2014 to publish nude photos of Kim Kardashian, they managed to ‘break the internet’ without generating any particular trust for Kardashian among her audiences.3, 4 And yet, our world is also one where Bob Dylan convincingly constructed himself for his early audiences as a rootless drifter jumping from boxcar to boxcar across the American south even as his songwriting elevated him to fame’s peak.5 Regardless of the predominant contemporary understanding of celebrity as insignificant, in certain cases audiences bestow particular celebrities with the sort of trust usually reserved for one’s closest confidants. What is it about certain celebrities that allows them to harness the trust of their audiences while other celebrities remain at a distance? That is, what differentiates a celebrity like Bob Dylan from one like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian? Sutherland 3 When phrased like this, the most obvious answer to this question is, quite simply, gender. This is not at all to suggest that only male celebrities have merit, nor that masculinity necessarily implies trustworthiness; much rather, at issue here is how audiences perceive a celebrity, and a celebrity’s gender goes far in shaping audiences’ perceptions. Sharon Marcus, always astute about gender, argues that “those who dismiss celebrity culture may be more motivated by unconscious gender bias than by reasoned assessment.” Marcus notes that when members of the public are asked “to name celebrities who deserve their fame […] the results will yield many more examples of men admired mostly by men than women admired mostly by women,” and that, when surveyed in 2010, far more respondents pointed to female celebrities like Kim Kardashian than to their male counterparts when asked for examples of “the silliness of celebrity culture.”6 The media, controlled as it is predominantly by men, only reinforces this narrative through its reporting, as “[t]he more feminized the fan base, the less seriously the press takes the star: millions of women must be wrong.”7 As a scholar of the nineteenth century, Marcus turns to history to further her argument: “during the many decades when the term celebrity comprised a host of august men, it had mostly positive connotations and was strongly associated with merit.”8 As more women become celebrities, celebrity itself was quickly disentangled from merit, and accordingly the connection between celebrities and the trust of their audiences began to wane. However compelling an explanation gender may provide, alone it an insufficient answer to the question at hand. After all, while gender perceptions certainly precondition audiences to laud certain celebrities and deride others, examples of disrespected male celebrities abound: just think of Carrot Top.9 What other factors, then, contribute to certain celebrities gaining the trust of their audiences while others remain fit for little more than tabloids and gossip columns? Just as gender biases influence the amount of trust audiences place in celebrities, so too does an audience’s Sutherland 4 perception of a celebrity’s authenticity affect that celebrity’s ability to garner the trust of that audience. Whereas for stars like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, style is substance, Bob Dylan’s substance is itself his style – or, at least, the appearance of substance is. For literary theorist Lionel Trilling, authenticity must be viewed in relation to sincerity.10 Trilling reads sincerity as a lack of pretense, suggesting that as the medieval world gave way to modernity authenticity, which Trilling defined in terms of individuality, overtook sincerity as a publicly valued trait. As anthropologist Richard Handler puts it, Trilling understands authenticity as “[having] to do with our true self, our individual existence, not as we might present it to others, but as it ‘really is,’ apart from any roles we play.”11 Emerging at the point when one’s individual identity became more pertinent socially than one’s place in a “divine hierarchy,” the concept of authenticity arose as a way to pose questions about possible incongruities between an individual’s inner life and their outer appearance.12 Authenticity, in contrast to sincerity, is of such value today, according to Trilling, because it emphasizes “individual selfhood” rather than “social relationships.”13 As such, “authentic culture is one original to its possessors, one which exists only with them.”14 Following this, Trilling notes that modern art need only appear authentic to interest its publics: “As for the audience, its expectation is that through its communication with the work of art, which may be resistant, unpleasant, even hostile, it acquires the authenticity of which the object is the model and the artist the personal example.”15 Other theorists have complemented Trilling’s analysis of authenticity as such with considerations of authenticity in the music industry specifically. In the analysis of Frankfurt School critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, a culture industry of corporations, performers, and marketing teams creates not audiences but consumers who worship at the altar of pseudoindividuality, always clamoring for more of the same, resulting not in art but the endless Sutherland 5 repetition without meaningful difference of artifice.16 Walter Benjamin hoped that mass production would result in a homogenized culture wherein the authenticity of art and music would be threatened with mechanization and a loss of aura.17 Modernization and the profit motive have given rise to the mass consumption not of art but of artifice produced according to predetermined, uniform, ideological formulae.18 While Sharon Marcus may argue that modernization and mass reproduction actually provides celebrity with a version of the same aura Benjamin hoped was being lost, particularly